]]>The Spanish carrier group Telefónica is big on WebRTC, the technology that allows for plugin-free in-browser voice and video calls, among other things – it uses it for the in-browser Skype rival that’s built into Firefox these days, for example. So it’s no surprise to see the firm turn to WebRTC to power the next generation of its Tu Go service, which extends Telefónica/O2/Movistar’s services from the mobile network to Wi-Fi.

Whereas the desktop Tu Go client has so far been a discrete affair, it can now be accessed from within the browser, as long as that browser supports WebRTC – so far, Chrome and Firefox apparently offer the best experience. There’s no need to download anything extra and, as with the new Reach Me feature in rival Orange’s Libon app, this provides another way to take and make calls using your normal mobile phone number even when there’s no reception (Libon doesn’t require you to be an Orange customer, though).

The service bases its experience on conversation timelines and is designed to make it easy to continue conversations across devices. Tu Go for Web also makes it possible to conduct up to five conversations at once, which sounds technically impressive if somewhat mentally taxing.

One more thing to keep an eye out for: Telefónica is experimenting with integrating Tu Go with IFTTT so, for example, incoming SMSes could be automatically saved in Evernote or incoming calls from specific people could change the color of your home’s lighting as an alert.

When Tu Go came out a couple years back, I said Telefónica had pulled off the rare trick of creating unique value in a carrier-backed “over-the-top” (OTT) app — rather than just trying to cannibalize its own mobile services with an OTT rival. It is using the internet to extend that core service to new devices. It’s good to see the company still playing around with new ideas that this IP-based world makes possible.

Tu Go for Web is available now to O2 customers in the U.K. and Movistar customers in Argentina. It will also soon roll out to Peru, Mexico and Brazil, which are entirely new markets for Tu Go.

]]>Money flowed into workforce-as-a-service platforms, and work chat technologies continued their incursion on already-aging social media collaboration tools. Will Microsoft split itself up to better exploit these trends?

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The conditional rule setting service, If This Then That (IFTTT) is on a roll with some new channels for internet of things lovers. The site has new options for the connected Quirky products that use the Wink app. So now your connected egg tray, piggy bank, A/C unit or even your power supply can tie into your email or other web services. I haven’t shelled out (heehee) for the Egg minder yet, but if I did I’d set up a recipe connecting it to Evernote so when I’m close to empty I could add eggs to my grocery list.

]]>A variation on the old Chinese curse for software startups could be “may you have impassioned — and articulate — users.” Last week, Jason Kincaid blogged about his growing disillusionment with Evernote, the popular note-taking app, in a post titled: Evernote: the bug-ridden elephant. You get the point.

Please read both posts for the whole story but here’s the gist from Kincaid’s point of view:

“Evernote’s applications are glitchy to the extreme; they often feel as if they’re held together by the engineering equivalent of duct tape. Browser extensions crash, text cursors leap haphazardly across the screen — my copy of Evernote’s image editor Skitch silently failed to sync for months because I hadn’t updated to the new version. Most issues are benign enough, but the apps are so laden with quirks that I’ve long held a deep-seated fear that perhaps some of my data has not been saved, that through a syncing error, an accidental overwrite — some of these ideas have been forgotten.

As of last month, I am all but sure of it.”

One of Kincaid’s biggest beefs was that Evernote support, in trying to help him recover lost notes, asked for his log file, which was riddled with personal information that Kincaid did not want to share with technicians.

Libin’s response should be a template for other companies suffering a major public meltdown. Maybe Snapchat, which has acknowledged security issues with its instant photo service, has yet to offer a similar mea culpa, for example. Without uttering the word “apology,” Libin nonetheless acknowledged most of the problems Kincaid brought up and vowed that Evernote will do better. (He also apologized personally to Kincaid, a former TechCrunch journalist.) Libin also outlined a problem endemic to startups — that for most of them growth is the top priority often to the detriment of product quality. Growth remains important of course, but …

” … there comes a time in a booming startup’s life when it’s important to pause for a bit and look in rather than up. When it’s more important to improve existing features than to add new ones. More important to make our existing users happier than to just add more new users. More important to focus on our direction than on our speed. This is just common sense, but startups breathe growth and intentionally slowing down to focus on details and quality doesn’t come naturally to many of us.”

Libin added said Evernote will figure out a way to boost quality while sustaining growth, just as business giants Apple, Google, Amazon and Tesla have and he promised that will be the company’s goal for 2014.

This is indeed a lesson for all startups and companies backing nascent technology. One of the criticisms of OpenStack, for instance, comes from people who think the community is rushing to add features at the expense of providing stability, for example. Sure, vendors want to add what’s shiny and new to their products, but too often they forget to prioritize stability, availability and all of the other boring “ilities” that are so crucial in both enterprise and consumer technology. Crucial, that is, if the startup wants to be around for the long haul.

]]>Evernote wants to entrench its note-taking and sharing application more in businesses and hopes that a new Salesforce.com version will help it do so. Evernote for Salesforce, which debuts Friday at the Evernote Conference, will be available from Salesforce’s AppExchange online store. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff will appear with Evernote founder Phil Libin at the launch.

Evernote, a personal note-taking, clipping and archiving application, was founded in 2008. Last year, it launched Evernote Business as a way for teams to share notebooks and collaborate.

The focus of Evernote Business is help co-workers work smarter. For example, a spokeswoman said, it makes suggestions when you search for keywords on notes authored by coworkers that might be relevant to what you’re working on. It also will suggest people you might want to talk to on a particular subject.

She said:

“If I search for “Evernote Food messaging,” Evernote will suggest the names of the marketing manager and product manager as people to seek out for more information. On a team of two or three people, it’s probably not a big deal. But in a company of a few hundred people, it makes a difference. Especially if you’re new to the organization.”

The company says it added 8,000 new business customers in the past year — without any outbound sales effort — and clearly Salesforce.com, a leading provider of CRM and related applications, could expand those horizons. Evernote Business costs $10 per user per month. It was not clear if that is the same price point for the Salesforce.com version.

Both Evernote Business and Evernote for Salesforce aim to help workgroups collaborate on documents and share information quickly and easily. Evernote for Salesforce users will be able to “clip” web pages, attach documents, make audio notes and add snapshots and other data to customer records.

Programs that let workgroups collaborate on and share documents are a hot spot now in this era of dispersed workgroups. Cloud file sharing and storage company Box recently announced Box Notes, a collaborative application that allows team members to co-author documents simultaneously. It’s due later this year.

Also at the conference, Evernote announced a partnership with 3M on a version of its application that will let users photograph, organize and archive Post-it Notes, and rolled out the Evernote Market, an online store for related products like a Fujitsu “Evernote Edition” scanner and Evernote-branded Moleskine notebooks and Post-it Notes.

]]>Evernote isn’t a stranger to working with companies that produce physical products: It partnered with Moleskine to produce Evernote-compatible notebooks last year, and it showcases third-party hardware, like scanners alongside apps in Evernote Trunk.

Now, however, Evernote is diving deeper into physical retail. At the company’s annual conference in San Francisco on Thursday, it announced the launch of Evernote Market, a collection of products that “represent peerless craftsmanship and first-to-market technologies to help people live better and work smarter.”

That includes hardware that’s designed to work with Evernote, as well as some products like wallets and rucksacks. I was most intrigued by the Fujitsu ScanSnap Evernote Edition scanner, which automatically scans content to Evernote and organizes it by type. (Other models of the ScanSnap can do this, too, but the integration with Evernote isn’t automatic.) With the ScanSnap Evernote Edition retailing at $495, I’m definitely not giving up my older ScanSnap model, but for those of you who are in the market for a new scanner, it’s worth noting that this one comes with a year of Evernote Premium (worth $45). It’ll launch in the U.S., Canada and Japan in late October.

There are also products that have nothing to do with going paperless, but that apparently “smartly support life, work and everything in between.” For example, “Paris-based cult bag brand Côte&Ciel” worked with Evernote designers to create Evernote-branded versions of some of their bags — a $242 rucksack and $210 “flat backpack.” Also, there are socks.

]]>Evernote is partnering with 3M on a smartphone app that will let users “photograph, store and organize pictures of their Post-its,” the WSJ’s Digits blog reports. The app is set to be released Thursday. 3M will also sell packs of Post-it notes with Evernote’s logo and an offer for a 30-day Evernote Premium trial. Evernote CEO Phil Libin said the Post-it note’s simplicity makes it “a hero product for us,” and noted that “Paperless as a concept is stupid. The goal is to get rid of stupid uses of paper.”

]]>Box Notes, a new free collaborative note-taking and authoring tool to be announced Monday at Box’s BoxWorks conference, is sort of like an Evernote for groups. To me, it threads the needle between Evernote and Google Apps or Microsoft Office.

For many, Office is feature overkill and Google Apps is an Office knock-off — what Box Notes will let you and your colleagues do is work simultaneously on documents and it uses a-little-bit-creepy-floating-head icons to show who’s doing what. It may remind you of the discontinued Google Wave collaboration tool, but Box is banking on a brighter future for its business-focused app.

Box Notes’ floating heads track who does what.

Whitney Bouck, SVP and GM of enterprise at Box, said the main reason for Box Notes is to make it easy for you, as a team member, to “fire up a note and, in the context of decision making or crisis management,” get your colleagues literally on the same page to brainstorm etc.

Box Notes isn’t a would-be Office killer (or is it?)

“This is not a full Office suite, but a simple note-taking utility,” she said. Still, you have to ask: How many people use even a tenth of what Microsoft Office provides? Box is fully aware of that. One of Box’s (irony alert) PowerPoint slides shows what happens if you open up all the toolbars in Word. It may be pretty, but it’s not very useful.

Microsoft Office suffers from a glut of features.

Evernote is a popular consumer note-taking application for collecting the snippets of your life and lets you share task lists etc., but lacks real-time collaborative features. Those are apparently coming via a partnership with >LiveMinutes, however.

It’s not just file-share-and-sync, it’s collaboration

Box faces formidable competition in the file-sync-share-and-store landscape in Google, Microsoft, Dropbox and a dozen smaller companies, so it’s trying to distinguish itself with its business-only focus and to carve out a bigger piece of the collaboration market.

It’s worth noting (again) that Sam Schillace, a key force behind Google Docs, is now VP of engineering at Box and Steven Sinofsky, who ran Microsoft Office and Windows, is now an advisor. Both of these guys are big thinkers in enterprise collaboration software.

Prospective tire-kickers can sign up for a limited beta this week at — Box CEO Aaron Levie will announce the product at BoxWorks on Monday. General availability for the free product is year’s end.

The first release promises concurrent editing in real time; collaborator presence (the aforementioned floating heads); in-line toolbar and annotations; comments etc. Plans call for a mobile version (interesting that this wasn’t first down the chute); the ability to embed video, images and audio; version history; and (this is a big one) offline editing. As we all know not even the most ardent web surfer is online 24 X 7.

The demo was pretty cool and I saw lots of ways to use Box Notes at Gigaom. If only they’d lose those floaty heads.

For more from Levie on collaboration, Steven Sinofsky and who writes his tweets, check out our Structure Show podcast.

]]>With documents being stored across all sorts of cloud services these days – Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive – a unified management tool can be a valuable tool for some. Germany’s doo tried to fill this role, but it went about it the wrong way. Now, chastened, it’s back with doo 2.0.

So what went wrong with version 1.0? After all, in theory it provided a neat unified space in which you could combine documents from those third-party services (including email accounts) with documents that have been scanned in, and those that are stored locally on the device. The idea was to use optical character recognition and smart auto-tagging to classify and organize this data – kind of like iTunes for documents.

According to CEO Frank Thelen, the problem was that doo was encouraging users to import all those documents to doo’s own cloud storage facility – an attempt to add backup and cross-platform sync to the mix, but not something users really wanted. Doo 1.0 only scored 250,000 downloads, which Thelen characterized as a disaster. (I also imagine offering its own storage added unnecessary expense to doo’s operations, too.)

Synchronizing in a two-way fashion with the likes of Google Drive and Evernote – so documents could be downloaded to the doo cloud for management then re-uploaded – was a big headache for the Bonn company. And at the time, doo also had trouble managing all the different languages that documents were written in, and couldn’t extract plain text to a satisfactory level.

“Doo 2.0 finally brings everything together,” he said. “The main mission is the same, but we don’t promote our own cloud storage anymore. Now we’re just a smart umbrella over it, so whatever you want to do, you have all your documents in one app.”

Doo cloud storage is still an option, but the company may remove it one day – it’s now quite happy to have users just automatically save their documents to third-party services, and to position itself as adding a layer of intelligence on top of those services.

The doo iOS and Android apps include scanning functionality for receipts and the like, with optical character recognition and auto-tagging still in there (hopefully in an improved form) to result in a searchable PDF that can then be saved to Google Drive, Evernote or wherever. That searchability is ultimately the point of doo – it teases out everything from email locations and phone numbers to links and geolocations.

Doo 2.0 is out now for Android, iPhone, OS X and Windows 8. For now, the service only has a free tier, but Thelen said doo would in future add premium paid-for features – he wouldn’t say what they will entail, other than that they will represent “advanced intelligence.”

]]>Evernote’s march across the globe continues: already boasting deals with the likes of Deutsche Telekom, Orange France and Taiwan Mobile, the company has now signed a strategic agreement with Madrid-based telecoms giant Telefónica.

These agreements essentially add a year’s worth of Evernote Premium as a free perk for the telcos’ subscribers – the premium version being the $45-per-year one that lets you use notebooks offline and securely, edit them collaboratively, upload more documents and search through them more effectively.

As per usual, the Telefónica deal will further entrench Evernote’s position as a go-to productivity app for mobile users. However, while previous deals have generally involved national carriers, Telefónica will offer this bonus to its 250 million customers around the world — or at least those signed up with “participating” Telefónica operators — starting with its Brazilian operator, Vivo.

According to a slightly odd statement by Evernote CEO Phil Libin, the company’s goal is to “make people smarter by creating a product that transcends local cultures and tastes while increasing productivity.” No extreme localization, then.